Archive for » January, 2010 «
Take 1 part social media. Add 1 part event and meeting professionals. Add 1 part social media specialists. Slowly stir in content from social media celebs, event professionals and attendees. Blend OpenSpace, Unconference and traditional conference elements. Let saturate at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City.
What is this a recipe for?
EventCamp 2010, February 6, 2010, an unconference style event for meeting professionals on social media and today’s events as part of NYC’s Social Media Week.
Who should attend?
You. Especially if you’re interested in the intersection of social media, meetings and events.
Why attend?
It’s a chance to experiment with a living lab and try different elements of OpenSpace strategies and Unconferences. There will also be a Genius Bar the entire time where you can get expert advice about your social media and conference challenges. Want one-on-one coaching with how to create a Facebook Fan Page for your event? Try the Genius Bar. Want personal coaching on social media strategy before, during and after the event? Try the Genius Bar. Want more information on hybrid events? Try the Genius Bar.
Want to know who’ll be there?
Along with a host of Eventprofs leaders (scroll down link to see list of attendees), take a look at these three great social media practitioners who will be sharing with the audience. To see full schedule, speakers and topics.
David Berkowitz – Opening General Session
How To Change The World: A Good Guide To Social Media Marketing For Your Events
February 6, 8:30 am
Description:
Discover how to use social media marketing for your events to increase awareness, attendance and word of mouth. Explore the strategic elements of social media marketing before, during and after your event. Discuss the 2010 social media trends for your conferences and events.
Bio:
Advertising Age named David Berkowitz one of the “25 Media People You Should Follow on Twitter” and he’s been called one of the “100 smartest people in social media. He is Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation for agency 360i and a frequent speaker and media pundit. He has been published hundreds of times in MediaPost, Ad Age, eMarketer and often quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Associated Press, New York Post, ABC News, CNN, USA Today, and dozens of other outlets.
Jason Falls
The Art of Listening: How Social Media Can Improve Event Communication
February 6, 3-4 pm
Description:
As companies, including event and meeting planners, participate in the conversation that is social media, the art of listening becomes a requisite. How can you participate if you don’t know what people are saying, right? This session will show you:
- How to find conversations relevant to your event or conference
- Help you understand how to participate meaningfully in them
- How to leverage those conversations for business intelligence
- How to measure and quantify those conversations appropriately.
Bio:
Jason Falls’ blog Social Media Explorer was named one of Social Media Examiner’s Top 10 Social Media Blogs for 2010. Falls is a social media educator, a social media strategist and public relations professional. He helps companies understand the social web and show them how engaging consumers online can help their business. Here’s how blogger Liz Strauss describes him: “Southern charm never looked so brilliant. Human never acted so real. Jason lives his ideals and his principles. If he says he’ll be there, he’s there in spades.”
Deirdre Breakenridge
Closing General Session: Social Marketing & ROI for Your Event
February 6, 4:15-5:30 pm
Description:
Deirdre Breakenridge will illustrate how to develop a social media strategy that focuses on building awareness and community around your events, from selecting the players and the platforms to the channels and measuring the engagement/experience. Breakenridge will cover a best practices approach to clearly identifying objectives and goals, key performance indicators, content/messaging strategy, developing social channels, conversation monitoring, analytics and measurement and ultimately how to turn your event participants into your event champions.
Bio:
Deirdre K. Breakenridge is President, Director of Communications at PFS Marketwyse. A veteran in the PR industry, Deirdre leads a creative team of PR and marketing executives strategizing to gain brand awareness for their clients through creative and strategic public relations campaigns. She counsels senior level executives at companies including RCN Metro Optical Networks, Quality Technology Services, JVC, Michael C. Fina and Kraft. Breakenridge just completed writing her fourth book with Brian Solis, “Putting The Public Back Into Public Relations” on PR 2.0.
You can beat the price of only $75 for registration which includes two meals. Register today.
We have some great sponsors too including: Conference 2.0, Social Collective, 7 Degrees Communication, EventBrite, Grass Shack Events & Media, Meetings Podcast, Core Staging, Velvet Chainsaw Consulting, Blue Sky Factory, PCMA and many others.
I hope to see you at EventCamp 2010 as part of New York City’s Social Media Week.
Any topics you want to make sure are covered in one of the openspace or unconference sessions? Have questions about the event?
Have you ever passed a note to another person during a meeting?
I’m not talking about the love notes we used to pass in high school. Nor am I talking about the origami paper fortune teller you used to create in junior high to pass the time and ask questions of your neighbors during boring lectures.
Fess up. Have you ever passed a note during a meeting?
Sure you have.
Have you elbowed the person sitting beside you during a presentation and made a gesture about what was just said? Or have you texted someone while you were in a meeting? Like maybe a family member or friend about when you’ll be done, where to meet or even to bring home the milk.
Let’s be honest. We’ve all done it and it’s been perfectly acceptable to do so. Unless you had a teacher that demanded everyone sit perfectly still, in rows, hands on their desks, eyes forward.
Or maybe you’ve made a beeline for another person as soon as the speaker was finished to discuss an idea shared. You wanted to talk about it with them immediately to apply the concept to your business
Or perhaps you’ve written a question that you’re dying to ask the speaker during their presentation. Or maybe you’ve questioned the credibility of their documentation and wrote yourself a note to disprove their findings.
Guess what, you participated in the old-fashioned form of a backchannel. A backchannel is when attendees communicate with others inside or outside the room. Today, backchannels are usually facilitated by Web-based technologies. They are often spontaneous, self-initiated and limited to the duration of that live event. Backchannels can be constructive when they enhance or extend the event’s content and are destructive when they amplify disagreements and controversy.
The Omnipresent Conference Backchannel
So how pervasive (invasive maybe?) are these backchannels? Can you expect your audience to talk back to the conference organizer and presenters at your next event?
A 2009 Weber Shandwick survey of global conference organizers showed that attendees were blogging and tweeting from conferences 58% more than the previous three years. comScore’s April 2009 data found that the 25- to 54-year-old crowd is actually driving the Twitter trend. 45- to 54-year olds were 36% more likely than average to visit Twitter with 25- to 40-year-olds 30% more likely. This is in direct contrast to conventional wisdom that younger people are driving the social media trends.
A December 2009 Pew Internet and American Life Project Internet research shows that 80% of Americans own a mobile device and 54%-56% connect to the Internet wirelessly. Two-thirds use the cloud.
If your conference audience demographic includes 25-54 year olds, and there is a wireless or mobile phone connection in the room, it’s safe to say that some people in the audience with be texting, tweeting or using some other similar service to create a backchannel.
Why The Increase In Backchannels?
So why have attendees turned to talking to one another during a presentation?
- Boring, one-way monologues and lectures
- Lack of presenter-attendee engagement during presentation
- Need to connect with others and share information as they are hearing it
- Need to be active during presentations as the brain is bored with passive listening for 45- to 90-minutes
- Attendees want to have a say and belong
- As a way to engage with the content
- To express their opinions about the presentation
- To build community
- To ask questions and clarify
Your Two Options
So conference organizers have two options.
A. Ignore the possibility that a backchannel will be used at their event and not monitor that conversation or provide customer service.
Risk: The lack of awareness of what conference attendees are saying in a voluntary backchannel could lead to disastrous consequences. For example, a speaker is blantantly selling their services during the session and attendees are tweeting about it. You could find out during the presentation and interrupt the speaker (by calling them into the hall.) Or you could find out after the event.
B. Facilitate the positive value of a backchannel and proactively help attendees use these alternative communication methods during an event.
Risk: Attendees could talk back about poor presentations, irrelevant content and bad speakers…but you’ll have honest, real time feedback on the areas needing the most improvement.
The choice is yours. The audience wants to talk back to you and the speaker. Can you hear them now?
What are some other reasons attendees use backchannels? How can event organizers help facilitate the attendee discussion during a presentation? What’s your experience, good or bad?
On Wednesday, January 27, 2010, I had the pleasure of presenting a breakout at Explore Minnesota 2010 Tourism Conference. Here is the workshop description and PPT from that presentation.
Many American consumers have internalized the recession experience. Research shows that marketers need a fresh lens through which to view consumers in a post-recession world. Traditional assumptions underpinning consumer, meeting attendee, and event professional segmentation are no longer valid. Many have accepted the radical changes as the “New Normal” and not just a cyclical phenomenon. Discover how meeting professionals are adjusting their event planning strategies to the “New Normal” and what you can do to attract emerging post-Recession consumer, attendee and event professional segments.
Disruptive technologies have impacted the way we communicate and work for years.
The relationship among event organizers, presenters and audiences is undergoing a fundamental change. Attendee 2.0 has embraced social media platforms and frequently engages in the backchannel discussing the event before, during and after the meeting. Attendee 2.0 has no problem reviewing the conference or expo, whether negative or positive and posting online for all to read. Many believe that the interaction that occurs in this new communication method is a threat to traditional conferences and will bring conference presentations to the brink of failure and negative public drama. And indeed that has happened in some instances.
The naysayers, those that try to control Attendee 2.0 and those that want to maintain the status quo, are not new. History has heard their hostile voices before and moved beyond them. Their rancorous rants could not stop many societal shifts. Consider the following.
- People said the first writing wasn’t needed and would distract people from being able to farm, produce and work. It didn’t. It helped merchants keep track of their goods and led to the written alphabet and words.
- The royals and elite said that the printing press would lead to the demise of talking. It didn’t. It led to an increase in adult literacy and the democratization of knowledge. People still talk today.
- The general populace thought the telephone would only be used for social, non-business affairs. It wasn’t. It became one of the primary tools of business as we know it.
- Society cried foul with the advent of the talking box saying it would end productive, quality lives and active communication. It didn’t. Television is one of the key communication tools today.
- The public screamed that the Internet was the work of the devil and would lead to the demise of community, family and intelligence. It didn’t. It has become as common as electricity and water in most people’s homes leading to more access to information and communication than ever.
- People said the birth of mobile phones and texting would speed the downfall of society and lead to family destruction, and the lack of basic social and communication skills. It didn’t. It’s led to a more connected society and the ability to communicate in new ways.
- Today misanthropists bellow that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter will lead to the destruction of society, less productivity and that people will no longer know how to have face-to-face conversations. It hasn’t and it won’t.
In each of these cases, when there has been a shift in common communication practices, several things happen:
- Our communication capability expands.
- We increase the distance and speed of our communication reach.
- The new way we interact affects the way we organize, shifts the balance of power and influences how we get things done.
Currently, conference and tradeshow organizers are feeling the impact of new media. Web 2.0 disruptive technologies, like the backchannel, have caused a new way for attendees to organize and shifted the balance of power from the organization to the attendee.
Despite the cynics and old school pessimists, the potential for positive outcomes from disruptive technologies like the backchannel are equally attention-worthy as we all deal with shifting presentation tectonic plates. There have been other disruptive technologies that have transformed presentations in a positive way including the introduction of blackboards and whiteboards, microphones, overhead projectors, image magnification, LCD projectors, video and presentation software like PowerPoint.
Today, one thing is sure, the backchannel is rewriting the job description of everyone involved with presentations, including the conference organizers, audiences and speakers.
- Conference organizers have to rethink how they bring audiences and presenters together both face-to-face and virtually.
- Audiences find themselves with the power in their hands and can bring down a presenter in a blink of an eye or help spread the speaker’s messages to the masses.
- Presenters’ jobs are changing the most because their view from the stage is rapidly changing.
As an event professional, you may think “This isn’t going to happen at my meetings. We have doctors, (dentists, executives, construction workers, plumbers…substitute your audience here) who will never use social media like Twitter to communicate with a backchannel.” Yet, the genie is not going back in the bottle and the situation can change as quickly as a click of the mouse.
Ready or not, you may have a backchannel waiting on you at your next conference, event, tradeshow or presentation. All of this raises some great fundamental questions to consider:
- What do audiences, including Attendee 2.0, expect from conferences, events, tradeshows and presentations today?
- What are the ground rules, if any, regarding backchannels and social media platforms at events?
- Who is accountable, the conference organizers, attendees, exhibitors or speakers?
- How can conference and tradeshow organizers seek and integrate real-time attendee feedback?
What do you think? What’s your experience? Share your thoughts.
Jeff Hurt + Dave Lutz = Associations with improved annual meetings & education.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed some changes recently. There’s a new logo, a couple additional pages, another photo on the About page, an additional writer and more frequent posts. You can expect further changes in the next couple months.
Wondering what this is all about? Here’s the scoop from my new boss, Dave Lutz.
From Dave Lutz
Three weeks ago today was Jeff Hurt’s first day as Director, Education & Engagement with Velvet Chainsaw Consulting (VCC). Other than a few tweets and an email, we haven’t really communicated what the change is about and what the heck we plan on doing. So if you are interested, here’s our game plan and answers to FAQs.
The Opportunity
2009 was one of the most difficult years many associations have ever experienced. New technologies, social media, free online communities and education offerings, decreased annual meeting attendance, attracting and engaging younger members, improving member loyalty, and membership retention are just some of the threats associations face. Associations need a good strategy…and they can’t afford to be wrong.
How we plan to help
We’re big believers and advocates for the value of face-to-face meetings. We also believe that the format and strategy of meetings and education needs to change significantly to remain viable products. We plan to help in two primary ways:
- Providing quality, thought provoking and beneficial content through our blog
This is our DIY strategy. Our goal is to average one post per work day. It’s more about quality and being helpful to you than meeting numbers. It’s also our way of giving back to the industry that both Jeff and I care about deeply. - Consulting projects
This is the “Do it with Us” strategy. We believe that many associations need help with their initial strategy and prioritization for annual meeting improvement. Often, it’s difficult for associations to make the needed changes as good ideas are often met with internal roadblocks. Outside expert opinions help associations move off their dime and make the necessary changes that benefit their events and ultimately their members.
Who else is VCC consulting?
VCC started nearly four years ago working with technology and service providers for major meetings and events. We’ve also worked with a few CVB’s and hotels. Most of our clients want to increase their market share for servicing large face-to-face meetings. We help them do that. Consulting with these clients is what pays the bills and we don’t plan on cutting back. With the addition of Jeff’s writing and social media skills, we will be delivering even more value to our clients in these segments.
Will you speak or write for us?
Those of you that have read a few posts here or my monthly column in Convene know that we are putting out some pretty thought provoking content. When you do that, you get asked to write and speak a lot. Unfortunately, speaking and writing for associations, magazines or newsletters doesn’t put food on the table. Consulting does. Don’t get upset if we say no. We’re giving lots away for free on our blog.
Can I pay you a commission to recommend our product or service?
Nope! That’s not our business model. We charge by the hour, day or project. We recommend companies or solutions because we believe in them and don’t take any kind of referral fees. If you think an association is tough to sell, we’re tougher. So if you want to show us your great technology, you better come with your A-game.
How’s it going so far?
To be honest, we’ve had quite a few ups and downs the first few weeks. Being what others consider to be two pretty hi-tech guys, we’ve had our share of challenges in setting up a new company email solution. We’re also trying to get into a groove of collaborating on both blog posts and consulting gigs. Both of us are pretty opinionated and hard headed, so we have our share of disagreements. (Good thing!)
Jeff and I have high expectations, so would love to be a little further along. PCMA in Dallas was a great show for us! From a networking perspective, there is no better. We have a few new irons in the fire and are more sure of the opportunity that we see with each passing day.
How you can help us
The fact that you are here and read this far means a ton to both Jeff and me! We’d be no where without our professional networks; especially our clients, past co-workers and of course the #eventprofs. We could use any and all of the following:
- Subscribe to this blog.
For those that don’t do RSS (like me), easiest way to do subscribe is via email on the top left of this page. If we don’t put out the kind of content that’s helpful for your job, you can either unsubscribe or call us to up our game. - Join the conversation.
Bottom line, our blog attracts some of the best and brightest minds in the industry. If you want to hang out with the “cool kids,” be viewed as a thought leader, ask some tough questions, or share your experiences, please add to the conversation by leaving your comments. We need you to help push us and other subscribers to new heights. - Share the good news.
If we write a post that you like, forward it to your clients, co-workers or suppliers (easy to do via email). We also could use more sharing on LinkedIn groups or Facebook. We’re getting lots of eyeballs through Twitter and re-tweets. Thanks a million! - Challenge us.
Our client base and thirst for learning put us near the cutting edge, but we’re only two guys. We love hearing about your challenges and ideas. If you have a problem that needs solved or a solution that may help other meeting or education professionals, we’d love to help spread the word. As they said in the Blues Brothers, “We’re On A Mission From God.” Are you with us? - Axe to Grind? Kudos To Give.
One of the cool things about being a small company is that we can move real fast and we really don’t care if we tick someone off. It helps to have a company name like Velvet Chainsaw too. We’re here to make an industry better. If we say that ASAE, IAEE, MPI or PCMA need to do something better, it’s not because we don’t love or appreciate the good work they’re doing. These associations are often trying new things. Some work, some don’t. It’s our job to help everyone find the solutions that work best. Fair?
While I’ve done some interesting projects and research on Annual Meeting improvement, I see a substantial opportunity out there. As we help more associations with their individual strategy, it will help us learn new tricks to share with everyone here at our blog.
We hope you’ll join us for the ride. It should be fun!
For more information visit velvetchainsaw.com
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